the_bear

This is just one data point, but my mom and I run a cooking blog that makes a decent amount of money from the Amazon affiliate program, and people from Pinterest definitely come to her site with an intent to buy. Given how much money we making from Pinterest visitors, it doesn't seem crazy to think that they could figure out a way to monetize their user base.

The honors and AP classes were generally pretty good (in math and science anyway) but those weren't always options. For example, in 10th grade, there wasn't an honors world history class, so I had to take the normal class. That's where I was taught what the big bang theory was. I knew it was wrong and tried to argue, but the teacher was pretty sure she was right. I immediately went to my adviser and got switched to a different teacher, but the rest of the class didn't know any better (many of them probably thought the teacher was right).

As for parents not getting involved, I'm not sure I ever told my parents about that stuff because I thought it was normal. Middle school was by far the worst part of the district, and a few years ago my brother and I were telling my parents stories about how about once per week there were school-wide riots in the lunch room that the FAs (bouncers) couldn't contain and we could do basically whatever we wanted for 30 minutes because of the chaos. It turns out my parents had no idea this was happening (my mom said she wouldn't have let me go back to that school if she'd known). We never told any parents because we thought every school had riots like that.

I went to the University City School District in St. Louis. It was actually a pretty strange place because it's the main district that Wash U (Washington University in St. Louis) is in, so about 10% of the students are children of (mostly white) professors and other very education-oriented professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc). Because of that, top classes (honors and AP) were actually pretty good. I, and many of my classmates went to Wash U and other top universities.

The rest of the student body was made up of poor, mostly black students who came from families where education wasn't a priority. Every single year I was in high school the state tried to revoke our accreditation and we just barely passed a state audit to keep it. I was a math tutor, and it was common for students to come in who couldn't do basic addition (in high school).

To make matters more confusing, the gap between the good students and the bad was almost entirely caused by economics (wealthier parents resulted in smarter kids, as is normally the case) but because the economic divide was almost identical to the racial divide, many of the educational issues were easily conflated with racial issues. This led to the (mostly black) teachers and administration demonstrating favoritism toward white students, and it also created tremendous social pressure on black students not to try to succeed academically (otherwise you're an oreo).

I wouldn't trade my experience there for anything. I received a pretty good education, and I experienced a part of America that more privileged kids should experience, but most of the students at my school were definitely being left behind.

It's common for people who received good educations to say that test scores aren't an acceptable indication of learning. It's probably true that if you already have an acceptable level of education, test scores shouldn't be too important, but it seems like the people criticizing test scores haven't experienced what education is like for the children being "left behind."

In middle school, the last three weeks of each semester were spent watching movies (the same two or three movies over and over). In high school, I was taught that the big bang theory was when the continents divided. I was taught that the most direct route between two points on the globe is through the north pole. My Spanish and woodworking teachers taught math because they knew that the math teachers weren't doing it.

When you're talking about schools like the ones I went to (which weren't nearly as bad as many other schools in America) I think that test scores are a decent indicator of the education a student is receiving. You're measuring things like "can this kid read English" and "can they multiply two numbers together." Standardized tests are certainly capable of measuring things like that. Testing probably breaks down for measuring intelligence/education as the level of education improves, but I encourage everyone to consider just how dysfunctional many schools are before ignoring testing entirely.

I tried signing up for Simple, and the entire experience was pretty terrible. I realize that they're a new company trying to tackle a big problem so I wanted to cut them some slack, but the ways in which they messed up are hard to forgive.

Last July, I got my invitation to use Simple.com, which I'd been really excited about for over a year. I start signing up, and instantly I'm surprised by how their signup form is both the most visually attractive form I'd ever used on a website, and how it barely worked. I ran into three different bugs just with the initial signup form.

One of the bugs was that it asks what type of smartphone I have. When I selected Android, it said to submit the form, but that they don't have an Android app yet. No problem, I don't care about a mobile app. The problem is that when you selected Android, the form broke and there was no way to submit it. I'd already spent several minutes filling out the form (including giving them info on my other bank account to transfer money into Simple) and I didn't want to lose all my info, so I just said that I had an iPhone so I could continue signing up.

Then I get to the next screen where it says that the only way to continue the signup process is to install the iPhone app. Of course I couldn't do this, so I emailed their support explaining that I'd mistakenly said I have an iPhone because of a bug with their signup form. I get a response back saying that if I don't have an iPhone, there's no way to use Simple, so I'd have to be added to the Android waiting list.

One problem: they'd already taken the money out of my other bank account. I assumed that they hadn't done this because I'd never actually signed up or agreed to their terms or anything like that (you agree to the terms via their app). I actually only know that they transferred money out of my account because a different support person emailed me in November asking why in the world I wasn't using my Simple account. I responded saying that I'd already talked to them about this, and I didn't have an iPhone. That person told me that I didn't need an iPhone and that I could use the service by logging in online. I forwarded her the email from a different Simple support person contradicting what she said, and she just dismissed it (basically saying, "yeah, that's not true") without apologizing or offering an explanation.

So I tried resetting my password online so I could log in, only to run into yet another bug with their software. The password reset feature was completely broken. So I emailed the support person saying that their password reset feature didn't work. She ignored the issue (no apology, no explanation, nothing) and just told me that I don't need an iPhone without explaining how to actually get into the software, or why I was given incorrect information earlier.

That's where we are now. I've been run in circles by their customer service, I've encountered a half dozen different bugs, and that's without even being able to log in! My next step is to call their 800 number, but I'm already completely fed up with the experience and I won't be a customer of theirs regardless of the resolution at this point. I've been frustrated by every bank I've ever dealt with, but none of them have been as bad as Simple so far.

I seriously hope they get these kinks worked out so that other potential customers don't have the experience I've had.

Your last point is a huge problem with the Google+ Android app. I like the normal g+ website, but on the mobile app it assumes that every single post is just a pretty picture. That app is a usability nightmare because they failed to grasp how people actually use social networks (which is strange since the design on the normal website seems to understand this just fine).

This seems like a pretty common mistake among designers. As a matter of fact, Facebook made this same mistake themselves not too long ago. When they release the "cover photo" feature, they showed off how great it looked when applied to a bunch of professional designers' profiles. When normal people started uploading low-res, vertically oriented images, it was instantly clear how silly of an idea the cover photo is.

Facebook seems to acknowledge this since now if you view a person's profile, it automatically scrolls past the cover photo so you don't even see most of it.

This is great. I've never actually had a customer dispute a charge through Stripe, but if it happened, I wouldn't be able to challenge it before (I only charge $10 at a time, so it would have been cheaper to just accept it). This always concerned me because it left the possibility that a customer could go back and dispute the last year's worth of charges and there's nothing I could do. This happened once when I used Amazon FPS to process payments, and I was forced to just let the customer take $120 from me. I know it's not much money, but it's really discouraging when you do everything you can to be up-front about billing, (monthly payment notifications, no-question refunds, easy cancellations) and then you have to accept frivolous chargebacks which is basically admitting to the bank that you did something wrong.

I don't agree that their experience is equally as statistically insignificant as yours. To me, a company should be providing an acceptable level of service to all of their customers, and they must have systems in place to make sure that huge blunders don't happen, even in rare cases.

Your experience doesn't prove that Google always offers good support. The occasional stories we hear about Google are enough to prove that they sometimes offer terrible support.

If I worked less, I'd want to spend the extra free time doing something important. The problem is, I don't think there's anything I could spend my time on that would be (a) more important than my normal work and (b) at least as likely to succeed as my normal work. I'm much more likely to do something I can be proud of if I put all of my time into one project rather than splitting it between several different projects.

If work is just a thing you do for money, then minimizing the amount of time you spend doing it makes sense. If you actually find work satisfying and care about the results, then I think it often makes sense to devote as much time as possible without causing yourself to stop enjoying it or become unproductive.

Having said that, I do try to reserve some time for side projects because that's a good way to develop new skills that I can apply to my main project.

Every time I sign up for a service and receive an email from recurly (or similar services), my first thought is, "this company doesn't care about user experience if they're trusting recurly to send me important communications." The email content is always generic and cold, and it's particularly unimpressive when I sign up for a free trial and receive a "thanks for subscribing" email telling me that I was successfully billed $0.00.

I'm glad that Stripe keeps their hands off my invoices. You could argue that Stripe could just let me turn that feature off, but Stripe understands that their customers are 100% responsible for the end-user experience, and I respect their decision not to get involved in that at all.

The guide itself was definitely being read. I built it directly into the app, so users could only advance the guide by completing the step described (like, they'd have to actually create a new contact before the guide would advance). A surprisingly high number of people completed the entire thing (~45% if I remember correctly) but very few of those people seemed to actually retain anything. We received way more support requests, and the conversion from trial to paying customers decreased (relative to just showing a video).

I don't mean to suggest that interactive tutorials can't ever work, but they were a huge failure for me. The only upside was that several people contacted us specifically to mention how awesome they thought the tutorial was. However, most of those people seemed to be other software developers that were interested in doing something similar. They didn't seem to actually be any more likely to subscribe.

I used to use a system like this for my software, and unfortunately I found that it did a terrible job of educating users. People would work through the entire tutorial (~5 minutes), get to the end, and then email/call me with questions that were covered in the tutorial.

I switched to just showing a few short videos demonstrating things and it works much better. It's disappointing because I was really excited about the potential of an interactive guide (and I spent a long time building it), but I can't argue with the numbers. My guess is that users were so focused on completing the steps that they didn't bother actually looking at the software, so they didn't retain anything. I can confirm that this is what happened with me when I clicked through to the link above. I clicked through all of the bubbles and finished the tutorial without reading a single word of text on the actual page.

I've got to give you credit for not being at all defensive. I have a hard time with that, and it's something that I need to get better at. When someone gives you feedback, you need to take it graciously. Either they're right, or you didn't communicate yourself well enough, and that's why they're wrong.

I had the exact same experience, but I was paying for their VPS service. I believe it was over $30/month, and it went down all the time with very little traffic. Dreamhost is a tempting host for a new site because it's so easy to set up, but I think you save time and headaches in the long run starting with someone else.

I rated a few beers, but my recommendation screen is empty. I get that it's a new site, so I can accept that it might be tough to get recommendations right away, but it would be really helpful to explain why there aren't any results. Is it because I haven't rated enough beers? Is it because there aren't enough other users that have similar tastes? Is it because there's a delay before results show up?

Also, I had to try searching for some beers multiple times because my search didn't quite match how it's entered in your database. For example, I didn't realize that "redhook" is one word instead of two. I know that search is tricky and it's perfectly understandable, but I just thought I'd let you know.

Other than that, it looks great. I'll definitely be checking back for recommendations in the future.

It wouldn't surprise me if this benefits Coke by making consumers more interested, but hurts Coke by pissing off store owners. Most stores that sell soda are set up for the consumer to take the soda from the front of a long row, and then the row slides up in the display. I'd guess that some customers would create a mess trying to find their name and not bother to clean it up (if they can - many soda refrigerators can only be easily loaded from the back).

If my speculation is true, that probably gives store owners an incentive to de-emphasize the placement of the Coke so that random browsers will be less likely to create a huge mess. Obviously store owners have to sell Coca-Cola because some customers are specifically looking for it, but they don't have to give it prime real estate.

These seem like good improvements, although I'm still not really clear on the benefits of using Stripe's recurring billing system rather than building your own. Given that you still have to send out your own emails and handle adjustments to the plans, it seems like basically the same amount of work either way.

I built my own recurring billing system using Stripe about 9 months ago because I need the per-seat pricing. It was incredibly easy, it gave me access to functionality that Stripe will probably never offer, and it allows me to plug in other payment providers if I ever need to.

Wow, that's awesome! My mom's going to be thrilled. I don't have an iPad, but you just got a new web user. Thanks.

Thanks! Yes, she takes all the pictures herself. It's incredibly time consuming, but pictures are such an important part of any food blog that it's definitely worth it.

One of her friends is a professional photographer and gave her some pointers when she first started which helped a lot. Even still, if you look at her older posts, you can tell that the photos weren't nearly as good back then as they are now. Practice makes perfect I guess.

The blog is entirely custom. Several years ago I made my own blogging software just as a fun side-project, and I decided to use that code as the base for The Yummy Life. It sucks missing out on all the great WordPress plugins, but it's really nice having absolute control over the entire experience. I know you technically have control with WordPress, but it's much harder to edit someone else's code than your own (for me, anyway).

Until recently, Amazon made up almost all of our revenue. Now that we're doing slightly better with advertising, Amazon makes up about 60-70%. We also sell a $1 eBook, but we only sell about one per day, so that revenue isn't significant. This information isn't up-to-date, but you can read a blog post about our monetization: http://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/articles/259/How_I_monetized_...

Visitor information:

-65% new, 35% returning

-1.7 pages per visit

-1.2 million page views last month

-Most traffic comes from Pinterest or direct. We get ~3000 visitors from search each day. My mom (understandably) hates link building, so we don't have many inbound links meaning there's not much referral traffic, and we also have weak SEO relative to other blogs our size.

-Almost all traffic comes from the U.S.

Honestly, we're not doing a great job of user acquisition right now, which is exciting because it means that 100 users/month is just the tip of the iceberg.

When we started we spent ~$3,000/month on AdWords to get our initial customer base. Once we had enough users, we stopped advertising and word of mouth took over. We basically don't do any marketing right now, but that we're going to change that soon.

There's an internal debate right now about whether or not it makes sense to release specific numbers, but if I have my way, there will be a post on HackerNews in the future explaining exactly how much money we're making, and how we got where we are.

For now, here are some things you might find interesting/motivational:

-My brother and I started the company about three years ago. We launched an MVP in January 2010.

-After 6 months we had about 10 paying users (at $10/user/month). After 12 we had 50, after 18 we had 200. Since then things have picked up and we're adding >100 paying users each month now. Both my mom's blog, and the SaaS business took a long time to ramp up, but both had their tipping points after about 1.5 years.

-About a year ago we hired our first employee to help out with customer service and other random things. We plan on adding four more over the next couple of years, two of whom have already started working part-time.

I hope that helps. There's nothing better than seeing thousands of people passionately using a product you created, so stick with it!

Thanks! Yes, I handle everything except writing the actual content. That includes PPC, SEO, and making it easy for my mom to promote posts via Pinterest and Facebook (Pinterest is responsible for our success by the way).

Most of the revenue comes from the Amazon Affiliate program, but recently we've been making a decent amount off of display ads from the BlogHer ad network. Google AdSense contributes a little bit as well.

As for SEO, I wrote the blogging software from scratch (I don't like Wordpress) so the SEO is entirely under my control. I'm no SEO expert though, so I'm sure there are many things I could be doing better.

A couple of years ago I started a food blog with my mom (www.theyummylife.com). She does all the writing, and I do programming, design, and monetization. I spent a lot of time setting it up originally, but now it only takes a few hours each week of my time. Right now we're making $5000-6000/month after expenses, and I get 40% of that.

My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the profits are mostly being reinvested back into the company, so I don't think it qualifies as passive income.

There's a big difference between saying something with a positive spin (vanity metrics, unfounded optimism, etc.) and photoshopping a fake picture of yourself with celebrities.

Most of your examples of lying are just about interpreting things differently. To an entrepreneur, their company is heading in the right direction because the signups are consistently going up. Sure, they haven't figured out how to keep those people engaged yet, but building a successful company takes time. There's not a blurry gray area between focusing on the positives and completely making something up that's provably false.

Yes, there are plenty of liars out there, but I don't think most of the behavior you're describing in your post fits that description.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, no one can argue with the idea that it takes a ton of work in many different areas to create a successful business. However, this doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a tipping point.

In my experience, many of my projects build on each other, and in many cases the true benefit of each project isn't clear until some critical mass of other projects have also been completed. For example, I spent the first few months of my business making what I thought was a pretty good product, but when I launched it, no one signed up. It turns out that my landing page sucked, I did a terrible job of onboarding the user, and the product didn't come with the right default settings. All of those things were important, but when I finished the last one, all of a sudden free trial users started turning into subscribers. That final project wasn't actually "that one thing" but it looked that way because it was the straw that broke the camels back.

So yes, there's probably not a "one thing" that will be responsible for taking you to the next level, but there will possibly be "one thing" that puts the finishing touch on a massive body of prior work. I think that's the dream that many of us use as motivation for pushing through the tough times at a startup.

Pricing is obviously a complicated issue, and I know there will never be a "right" or "wrong" way to price a product. I guess all I can say is that I don't agree that plan-based pricing is good for the consumer. One of my main objections is that I don't agree that plan-based pricing is easy/simple.

Take a look at Highrise: http://highrisehq.com/signup 37signals seems to have set the standard for plan-based pricing pages, so I think this is a good example to use. Right off the bat it's complicated because I to choose which plan I want before signing up. How in the hell do I know how many deals I need? Then I have to constantly monitor usage to make sure Idon't pass the invisible threshold. Uh oh, one of my employees added one contact and my price just doubled. That's the opposite of simplicity.

Now let's look at a more recent 37Signals pricing page: http://basecamp.com/pricing This is still plan-based, but it's much closer to being a la carte based on the number of projects used. I can't speak for 37Signals, but it would seem as if they don't think that the plan page they popularized is actually the best approach.

Things can definitely get too complicated if the units you measure with a la carte become too granular (like charging per byte of storage or something crazy like that), but there's normally a nice middle ground. Basecamp made # of projects the metric to focus on. My company charges per user and makes everything else unlimited which generally makes the cost scale linearly with usage (roughly) but it's still very simple and predictable so no one has to spend time checking the invoice.

My company is called "Less Annoying CRM" so we naturally attract people who are sensitive to the annoying shenanigans that are common with other companies, and this is one of the biggest things my customers tell me they like about our service. The pricing has a huge impact on the customer experience which is largely ignored in this blog post. (Note: I realize there is selection bias with my anecdotal evidence, so you can say I don't have the complete picture, although I think after 2.5 years of talking to potential customers every day, I've got a decent idea)

In addition to all of that, it seems clear to me that the purpose of plan-based pricing is to get the majority of your customers to pay more than they should by only allowing them to buy more resources than they need. This is obviously true with cable subscriptions and cell phone plans, and I think it's equally true with SaaS apps. This is even more apparent when you read blog posts like this one and understand how much thought goes into designing a pricing structure that extracts every penny possible from each and every customer.

If you want to make more money, then ok, but I don't buy the claim that this is in the customer's best interest.

Agreed. I don't doubt that being ruthless about A/B testing pricing increases revenue, but I'm not wild about the implied attitude that customers only exist so that we can extract as much money as possible from them. The user experience should definitely be a factor as well.

I don't think it's possible to support this claim with data, but I'm convinced that being ruthless and unfriendly with pricing can have a negative impact on the business in the long term. As a customer, I much prefer usage based pricing to arbitrary plans.

Yes, it was a pretty informal test, but the results were clear. Before adding the demo option, about 21 people signed up for the free trial each day. After adding the demo option, that dropped to about 16/day, but 30+ people tried the demo each day (including the 16 that signed up). So basically, and extra ~10 people per day tried the product with the demo option.

There's a 30-day period before those people have to decide to pay, so I didn't run a full A/B test during that entire period because we were clearly getting more qualified signups, so I don't perfect data on exactly how big the increase was.